The Doubtful Cartographer
Somewhere out there, the Doubtful Cartographer is leaving traces of her occult geography and clues to the “treasures” therein. We ask you to look around you for fragments of the map hidden in plain sight (it could be anything—a shadow, or a stain, or a puddle, or…)
Once you think you’ve found it:
Determine the name of this place.
Briefly describe it, or depict it in some way, or photograph it. Feel free to emphasize any important geographical features.
The Handshake Strait
A narrow passage between the continent and Van Ghastly’s Island. The northern peninsula of the isle stretches out towards the mainland as if attempting to close a deal on advantageous terms. The strait is notable for its bizarre waters, aggressive pirates, and a string of horrifying 19th-century whaling disasters.
Map of Inverse Lapland
Unlike our everyday earth-bound Lapland, this place can only be reached by wandering an underground tunnel while under the influence of a thickening hypnagogic state. At some point, an unknown trigger will cause the invisible window standing beneath your skull to fall apart, and this strange and solitary place will appear. The first thing you will notice is that everything is painted in a single color here, Cobalt blue. Unfortunately, no other colors have ever been able to take root. If feeling adventurous, one may try leaving behind an invasive green or purple cabbage on the way out, since a few have been known to thrive in such soil. Overzealous Jelly Guardians and Saucer Cells are quite attracted to their scent, however, and may quickly eradicate them. A risk either way. The mountains of Inverse Lapland grow eternally downwards, her volcanos suck wildly at the air, and her animals bear a plump and seedless fruit. Much more could I say about this strange land, dear reader, but I have decided (mercifully) to let you discover the place for yourself.
The Spittoon Archipelago
To the northeast the Spittoon Archipelago rises gently like a manatee’s ire from the sluggish Treebark Sea. It was formed after a ghostly face in the heavens was seen spitting a ginger root into a cracked human skull; the sea, in hopes of attracting a ghostly mate, put up islands in its likeness. A god dwells on the largest island, who looks like three turtles dancing in a violet flame emerging from the barrel of a green water pistol. Those who make the journey and burn an offering of hairballs soaked in bourbon will return home to find that their landlords have died. This archipelago reproduces by means of spores migrating in the center nostril of the Hyperborean Bee-shark, and it is estimated that, today, roughly nine thirteenths of the world’s bodies of water are home to young spittoon archipelagoes.
Limbic-Gray Morning Range
The Limbic-Gray Morning Range is an unassuming geologic crumple whose topography has been erased by snow. Whatever tectonic pressures or volcanic emissions have shaped this landscape are too humdrum for geologists to care; but those who pilot their dog sleds over these blank slopes attribute them to a pair of exhausted but fitfully sleeping giants who have turned up the lithosphere as chaotically as the sheets of an unfamiliar bed in a roadside motel. What dreams and discomforts may have bedeviled these giants, what creator deities may have perpetrated such disturbances for the purpose of transducing them into mountains, may now only be guessed at beneath the snowy cloak of oblivion.
Tarpauline Sepulchre, location ubiquitous.
For just over 18 minutes on the solstice, a light penetrates the depths of dusty blue-black sheaths, beckoning the weary into the labyrinthian tomb of Lost Americana.
Snapshot from the Pole of Total Inaccessibility
The Pole of Total Inaccessibility, located among the transparent landmasses of the Northwest Passage postulated to exist by John Dee, is reached only with the secret fortitude that survives severance from all the extremities of your body, at the cardinal point where the arcanum is unveiled that the internal and external are completely indistinguishable. The only way for the traveller who encounters the Pole to continue to live is through an intricate and startling form of auto-dissection, a scorching sensation which resurrects memories of delicate fronds of unearthed glass, of a much-loved woman’s perfume obscuring the mirror and melting the shimmering carcass on the other side…
– Jason Abdelhadi, Steven Cline, Nathan Grover, Megan Leach, Ryan McCarthy, & Vittoria Lion